A podcast about photographs and memory

Noor: Welcome back to Thinking Aloud. This week we're asking whether keeping a record of everything makes us remember less. My guests are Callum Reid, a cognitive psychologist, and Tamsin Okafor, who looks after a community archive of family photographs. Callum, is our phone-filled lifestyle quietly damaging our memories?

Callum: I'd resist the word damaging. There is some evidence that people who photograph an object remember fewer of its details than people who simply look at it. The likeliest explanation is that we hand the job of remembering to the camera, so we pay less attention. But the effect is small, and it disappears if people are asked to zoom in on one particular feature, because that forces them to look properly.

Tamsin: That rings true from my side of things. People bring me shoeboxes of old prints, and they rarely remember the day a picture was taken. What they remember is the story that was told about it afterwards. It's the retelling that keeps the memory alive, not the picture itself.

Noor: So the photograph is a prompt, rather than the memory.

Callum: Precisely, and that's why I'm less worried about quantity than about what happens next. Thousands of unsorted images are almost worthless, because nobody ever returns to them. Not only do we fail to revisit them, we rarely even choose which ones matter.

Tamsin: Which is why I tell families to throw things away. It sounds odd coming from someone in my job, I know. But a selection of thirty pictures with names and dates written on the back will mean far more to a grandchild than thirty thousand files that nobody can search.

Noor: Does the technology make that kind of selection easier or harder?

Callum: Both, really. Apps that resurface old pictures can spark genuine recollection, but they sometimes feed us a polished version of the past. We may end up remembering the highlights rather than the ordinary days that made up most of our lives.

Tamsin: I'd go further. The ordinary days are exactly what future historians will want. Hardly anyone photographs a Tuesday afternoon, yet that's the life that was actually lived.

Noor: A final thought from each of you. What would you ask listeners to do this week?

Callum: Put your phone away at one event and see what you can recall a month from now. Treat it as a small experiment, not a rule.

Tamsin: Choose one photograph, ring the oldest relative you know, and ask them what was happening just outside the frame.